I’m working with my best friend on the redesign of a site - it’s her customer and her business, I’m just doing the web analytics and SEO. Today I was on the phone with her going through all the old pages, and she kept stopping me. “Where do you see all those pages?” she asked.

I wasn’t clicking around - I’m much too lazy for that. Instead, I use Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which is still in beta.

I haven’t found a definitive resources that shows all the pages of a site. The Google command, site: www.yoursite.com is also very helpful for this purpose, and like Yahoo, only shows you “about” how many pages you have. But Site Explorer is more feature-rich than Google. It enables you to look only at the domain itself (www.mydomain.com) or at all the subdomains too (www.subdomain.mydomain.com). It also enables you to specify partial domains so that you find out everything that is in a certain part of your site. For example, I could enter www.lunametrics.com/conversionrate for our site and get the main conversion rate page as well as all the pages that are in the conversionrate index — if Yahoo indexes them.

You can learn more about Yahoo Site Explorer . I’ll write about Google SiteMaps on a future occasion.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Are you going to the e-Metrics Summit? Not the one in Santa Barbara (it’s sold out already.) This year, there will be a second, bigger US summit in Washington DC, October 16-18. If you register now, you get the double early bird discount, I’m told. I’m speaking on Marketing for Techies (Marketing 101), but I’m sure that everyone at that time will be in the Tech-speak for Marketing-types seminar. My readership is international so I should point out that there is a London seminar in there somewhere, too.

Actually, I think the marketing vs. IT problem is the second biggest problem we have in web analytics. The biggest problem is that we analysts worry how to make our analytics talk to our CRM, or we worry about installing our getQueryParam code while our potential customers still say, “Now, tell me again, what are web analytics?”

Robbin
LunaMetrics

“What’s a good conversion rate?” I get asked, all the time. One person filled out the “contact us” form on the LunaMetrics website just to ask that question. The web analytics for this blog show that visitors who aren’t using feeds (so, they aren’t subscribers — they are picking up my blog on the newstand, so to speak) are very often searching on some version of that question.

There are a whole bunch of caveats that go with this question. How do you define conversion rate, by conversions/unique visitors or conversions/visits? The latter will be a smaller number. What’s the time period? What’s the industry? Maybe the conversion rate is low but they purchase high margin items. Maybe the conversion rate is low but they purchase at a store, or they call you up to use your services (but you can’t track the phone call without the latest technology.) And why do you care so much anyway — you should be comparing your numbers to your numbers from last year, not to everyone else’s numbers.

Having said all that, I know that you still want to know “the answer.” I saw some FireClick index numbers from 2003/2004, showing that the lowest conversion rate in their sample was among consumer electronics (about 1%) and the highest was among catalogers (about 6%). This makes perfect sense — the catalog companies, like Lands’ End, have been at the direct response game for years, and understand it incredibly well. Remember that the numbers are old (in Internet years) and that I don’t know how they are calculated (by visits? unique visitors?)

But you really don’t have to rely on my 2.5 year old information. Instead, go to Fireclick, where they show the index every week. They only give numeric information for “this week” and “last week” but you can see information over time by looking at the little graphs in the right margin. And if you’re that interested, you can create an Excel spreadsheet, tune in to their site every week, fill in the weekly numbers, and you’ll have calculated a conversion rate for your vertical within 13 weeks.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Does your site mean the same thing to your readers as it does to you?

Frequent readers know that poor writing for the web drives me a little crazy. The worst are the site owners who insist on using their own language, despite the fact that it is meaningless to the rest of the world. Not quite as bad, but still up there on my list of lousy web writers are the site owners who really do think that everyone else understands (they just don’t.)

So I have a real life story, along these lines. Since I’m an analyst, I’m always looking for new ways to measure my blog and my site. Last week, I signed up for Blogbeat (web analytics for blogs.)

It’s a free 30 day trial and the signup is simple enough. Then I got to this field, “RSS or Atom URL.” Now that I use FeedBurner, I couldn’t tell easily if my feed is RSS or Atom. I hunted around some and then just decided that it was probably RSS. (For the record, my feed when I originally wrote this post was in Atom.) I was surprised when the signup screen came back to me with this error message, “We couldn’t verify your RSS or Atom Feed. Please check it again… etc.” Well gosh, I thought, how could they verify my feed when they never even asked for it… at which point I realized that I had completely misunderstood the “RSS vs. Atom” field. Blogbeat wasn’t asking whether my feed was RSS or Atom, they were just asking me to please type in the name of my feed (be it RSS or Atom.)

This is a great example of how sites lose visitors. The visitor tries to give you their money or sign up, but we make it too hard for them. If we want a credit card card in a special format (no hyphens), then tell the visitor. If the web address needs the http, tell the visitor. Blogbeat needs to tell their visitors what they want, up front. (Also, they will convert more visitors if they tell them where to find one’s feed address - the universe of people who have blogs and other feed-type media is no longer as tech-savvy as it once was.)

Robbin
LunaMetrics

After trying to subscribe to Jim Sterne’s newsletter, Sterne Measures, for a month now, the light bulb went on and I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it in Mozilla from the e-Metrics Summit site. So I moved over to IE (I really hate IE, but it is useful at times) and subscribed, no problem at all.

It was a double opt-in — the kind where you sign up and then you get an email asking you to confirm your fervent wish and desire to be on the mailing list. So I did the second opt-in from my email box and was very promptly greeted by this new email message:

OK - now you’re subscribed to Sterne Measures.
Thanks for being willing to work so hard.
Here’s the most recent issue: February 28, 2006

What great writing! It felt like he was standing there talking to me. Every bit as great as the auto-response that Jarad Spool wrote me when I signed up for the UIE course.

Sometimes I have trouble writing in this one-to-one style — especially when I’m doing my email marketing, which I find so much harder than blogging. When that happens, I imagine just one person I know who is on my email list, and pretend like I’m writing the email just to her. Later I go back and take out all the really personal stuff, but it helps create that “just you and me” tone that is so vital to the Internet. Remember — leave the Madison Avenue tone to the advertising agencies and find a genuine voice on the web. You’ll create a more authentic site, have greater credibility — and ultimately, convert more browsers into buyers.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

A great website should be like a good butler, I learned from an old book, Designing from Both Sides of the Screen. Butlers anticipate needs and work silently, as a good website should.Since most of the book isn’t worth reading unless you are going to design a computer application, here are the web highlights. Note that I’ve updated them for 2006 and made them specific to the web only, so apologies to the authors for the liberties I’ve taken:

Respect physical effort: Don’t offer the visitor product if you don’t have it for sale yet. Don’t ask the visitor to click if she doesn’t have to - clicks are sacred. Remember where the customer was in the clickstream (so if they put something into the shopping cart, and decide to continue shopping, return them to where they were before they visited the cart). Remember information the visitor tells you for the entire site visit.

Respect mental effort: Don’t give people too much to look at or they will look at none of it. (This is especially true for on-site search.) Make common tasks prominent. Give feedback and show progress (”You are on step 1 of 2.”) Follow conventions even if you don’t love them (for example, an asterisk like this * has come to mean, “required field”. Companies who try to violate that convention have trouble getting conversions.) Start with smart preferences instead of asking for them all the time (bargain shopping sites should start with search ordered from cheapest to most expensive - a smart preference for a bargain site.)

Be Helpful: Accept information in many formats (can’t we be a little more forgiving in the way we accept telephone numbers and credit cards?) When you can’t accept many formats, tell people ahead of time. Don’t make people re-enter all their information after they enter one piece of it wrong (doesn’t it drive you batty to fill out a whole form and have it come back empty because you forgot the three-digit code on the back of your credit card?) Don’t blame the customer. Request only the information you absolutely need. Explain in the customer’s language, not yours.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

FeedBurner, hit a double yesterday with their new Uncommon Uses service. They both enhanced their analytic service and set up a great conversion opportunity for themselves.

First, the analytics. Those of you who know FeedBurner already understand that they are the company that handles your feeds - tracks them, measures them, gives you tools to enhance them, etc. Yesterday, they unveiled their Uncommon Uses service, which tracks strange, different or just uncommon uses of your feeds. For example, they showed me that one site is a blog that pulls together many web analytics feeds, and I was featured.

They also unveiled (or at least, showed me for the first time) Aggregate Item Use — i.e. which posts get clicked on the most. (Note: I learned that my recent post on Campaign Codes, which I thought was too techie for the marketing people and too simple for the techies, was my most popular.) But to access Aggregate Item Use, one needs a secret handshake, or at least a subscription to their Pro Service ($4.99/month for 3 feeds or less).

This was nothing short of brilliant in the field of conversion science. Here’s what FeedBurner did right:

• They showed me what I’m missing. I’ve been using the service for three months now, and this is the first time I have even wanted to pay five bucks a month because it’s the first time they’ve showed me what it can do for me. Or to paraphrase a recent post, I saw what was in it for me.
• They didn’t scream at me when I tried to access this member’s only part of the site (Like those awful error messages, “Subscribers only - Keep out.”) Instead, they handled it with humor and made me feel like I wanted to spend the money.

And so, I did. Spend the money, that is.

Robbin ( FeedBurner Pro Member)
LunaMetrics